It’s Summer Break in Yemen, and the Children Are off to Houthi Boot Camp

The Houthis launched their 2025 children’s summer camps in April, even as the group faces U.S. retaliation for its attacks on Red Sea shipping and Israeli civilian targets. These camps have become a mainstay of the Houthis’ indoctrination programs. An official in the Internationally Recognized Government of Yemen warns that these camps reach hundreds of thousands of children a year, though the Houthis claimed over a million attendees in 2023.

Houthi-regime media reported that “all governorates and districts are witnessing … a wide movement and great interest in launching summer courses … as everyone has come to realize their importance and the significant results they achieve.”

Summer Camps Are Central to Houthi Indoctrination

In an address to mark the opening of summer activities this year, Abdulmalik al-Houthi, leader of the terrorist group, described the summer camps as “fortification in the face of the corrupting, misleading, aggressive war called the soft war.” Underscoring the threat of foreign culture, al-Houthi warned, “the enemies of Islam have transformed the youth of our nation into sub-humans through soft warfare, filling them with misguidance, corruption, loyalty to the enemies of Islam, stupidity, and lack of insight.”

In the Houthi camps, students listen to lectures on the Quran and speeches from Abdulmalik al-Houthi and learn Houthi doctrine. Parents reported their children came home reciting Houthi slogans including “the scream,” which expresses the group’s fundamental beliefs and objectives: “God is the greatest, death to America, death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews, victory to Islam.” While children ages six and above attend day camps, there are overnight camps for boys aged 13-17, where military training is reported and access is restricted.

The boys learn military skills, while girls are taught first aid, housekeeping, cooking, and how to further Houthi doctrine within the home and women’s spaces. A 2022 report by the Panel of Experts on Yemen found that “children as young as 7 years of age were taught to clean weapons and evade rockets.”

The Houthis have increased recruitment of child soldiers, according to activists in Yemen, since launching their offensive in solidarity with Hamas against Israel and Western shipping. Despite the Houthis’ assent to a 2022 UN Action Plan to protect Yemeni children, including commitments to end the use and recruitment of child soldiers, the State Department’s 2024 Trafficking in Persons Report found, “There was a notable increase in the recruitment, training, and mobilization of children in the conflict by the Houthis.”

Houthis Compel Parents to Send Their Children

Humanitarian aid to families, in some instances, has been conditioned on enrolling their children in summer camps, according to the UN Panel of Experts Report. The United Nations estimates that 80 percent of the Yemeni population requires humanitarian assistance, making the population highly susceptible to aid manipulation. In north Yemen, the Houthis manage lists of aid recipients and can remove families if they are not compliant with the group’s demands. Local sources assert this practice is ongoing.

Arab and local media have reported that the Houthis also kidnap children to force their attendance at summer camps. Kidnapping civilians is standard practice for the regime. The Houthis routinely detain Yemenis and international workers in domestic repression campaigns.

Houthi Human Rights Abuses Cannot Be Overlooked

The Global Magnitsky Sanctions Program, as implemented by Executive Order 13818, targets those around the globe responsible for serious human rights abuses. The Houthi Supreme Committee for Summer Activities and Courses, which oversees the regime’s summer camps, appears to meet the criteria for sanctions under E.O. 13818, as do individual members of the Supreme Committee. Likewise, all individuals and regime organs responsible for the training and recruitment of child soldiers appear to merit designation.

To ensure financial repercussions in addition to the human rights sanctions, the Trump administration should sanction financial institutions supporting the terrorist group and push for the disconnection of Houthi-controlled financial institutions from the international payment system, SWIFT.

Bridget Toomey is a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where she focuses on Iranian proxies, specifically Iraqi militias and the Houthis. For more analysis from Bridget and FDD, please subscribe HERE. Follow Bridget on X @BridgetKToomey. Follow FDD on X @FDD. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.